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Top Engaged Papers from Popular CS Conferences

Welcome to a curated collection of the most engaged-with papers from esteemed computer science conferences: the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), and the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML)! Explore these works that are at the forefront of shaping the future of natural language processing and understanding.

This list collects papers published in these conferences that have not only garnered significant page views but have also been frequently saved in libraries on Semantic Scholar. If you have any feedback or suggestions, please contact us.

Last updated: December 21st, 2023

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Illustration: Trending Papers
ACL

Self-Instruct: Aligning Language Models with Self-Generated Instructions

  • Wang et al.

  • ACL

  • December 20, 2022

Large “instruction-tuned” language models (i.e., finetuned to respond to instructions) have demonstrated a remarkable ability to generalize zero-shot to new tasks. Nevertheless, they depend heavily on human-written instruction data that is often limited in quantity, diversity, and creativity, therefore hindering the generality of the tuned model. We introduce Self-Instruct, a framework for improving the instruction-following capabilities of pretrained language models by bootstrapping off their own generations. Our pipeline generates instructions, input, and output samples from a language model, then filters invalid or similar ones before using them to finetune the original model. Applying our method to the vanilla GPT3, we demonstrate a 33% absolute improvement over the original model on Super-NaturalInstructions, on par with the performance of InstructGPT-001, which was trained with private user data and human annotations. For further evaluation, we curate a set of expert-written instructions for novel tasks, and show through human evaluation that tuning GPT3 with Self-Instruct outperforms using existing public instruction datasets by a large margin, leaving only a 5% absolute gap behind InstructGPT-001. Self-Instruct provides an almost annotation-free method for aligning pre-trained language models with instructions, and we release our large synthetic dataset to facilitate future studies on instruction tuning.

TLDR

Plan-and-Solve Prompting: Improving Zero-Shot Chain-of-Thought Reasoning by Large Language Models

  • Wang et al.

  • ACL

  • May 6, 2023

Large language models (LLMs) have recently been shown to deliver impressive performance in various NLP tasks. To tackle multi-step reasoning tasks, Few-shot chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting includes a few manually crafted step-by-step reasoning demonstrations which enable LLMs to explicitly generate reasoning steps and improve their reasoning task accuracy. To eliminate the manual efforts, Zero-shot-CoT concatenates the target problem statement with “Let’s think step by step” as an input prompt to LLMs. Despite the success of Zero-shot-CoT, it still suffers from three pitfalls: calculation errors, missing-step errors, and semantic misunderstanding errors. To address the missing-step errors, we propose Plan-and-Solve (PS) Prompting. It consists of two components: first, devising a plan to divide the entire task into smaller subtasks, and then carrying out the subtasks according to the plan. To address the calculation errors and improve the quality of generated reasoning steps, we extend PS prompting with more detailed instructions and derive PS+ prompting. We evaluate our proposed prompting strategy on ten datasets across three reasoning problems. The experimental results over GPT-3 show that our proposed zero-shot prompting consistently outperforms Zero-shot-CoT across all datasets by a large margin, is comparable to or exceeds Zero-shot-Program-of-Thought Prompting, and has comparable performance with 8-shot CoT prompting on the math reasoning problem. The code can be found at https://github.com/AGI-Edgerunners/Plan-and-Solve-Prompting.

TLDR

Distilling Step-by-Step! Outperforming Larger Language Models with Less Training Data and Smaller Model Sizes

  • Hsieh et al.

  • ACL

  • May 3, 2023

Deploying large language models (LLMs) is challenging because they are memory inefficient and compute-intensive for practical applications. In reaction, researchers train smaller task-specific models by either finetuning with human labels or distilling using LLM-generated labels. However, finetuning and distillation require large amounts of training data to achieve comparable performance to LLMs. We introduce Distilling step-by-step, a new mechanism that (a) trains smaller models that outperform LLMs, and (b) achieves so by leveraging less training data needed by finetuning or distillation. Our method extracts LLM rationales as additional supervision for training small models within a multi-task framework. We present three findings across 4 NLP benchmarks: First, compared to both finetuning and distillation, our mechanism achieves better performance with much fewer labeled/unlabeled training examples. Second, compared to few-shot prompted LLMs, we achieve better performance using substantially smaller model sizes. Third, we reduce both the model size and the amount of data required to outperform LLMs; our finetuned 770M T5 model outperforms the few-shot prompted 540B PaLM model using only 80% of available data on a benchmark, whereas standard finetuning the same T5 model struggles to match even by using 100% of the dataset. We release the code at: https://github.com/google-research/distilling-step-by-step .

TLDR

Unnatural Instructions: Tuning Language Models with (Almost) No Human Labor

  • Honovich et al.

  • ACL

  • December 19, 2022

Instruction tuning enables pretrained language models to perform new tasks from inference-time natural language descriptions. These approaches rely on vast amounts of human supervision in the form of crowdsourced datasets or user interactions. In this work, we introduce Unnatural Instructions: a large dataset of creative and diverse instructions, collected with virtually no human labor. We collect 64,000 examples by prompting a language model with three seed examples of instructions and eliciting a fourth. This set is then expanded by prompting the model to rephrase each instruction, creating a total of approximately 240,000 examples of instructions, inputs, and outputs. Experiments show that despite containing a fair amount of noise, training on Unnatural Instructions rivals the effectiveness of training on open-source manually-curated datasets, surpassing the performance of models such as T0++ and Tk-Instruct across various benchmarks. These results demonstrate the potential of model-generated data as a cost-effective alternative to crowdsourcing for dataset expansion and diversification.

TLDR

Precise Zero-Shot Dense Retrieval without Relevance Labels

  • Gao et al.

  • ACL

  • December 20, 2022

While dense retrieval has been shown to be effective and efficient across tasks and languages, it remains difficult to create effective fully zero-shot dense retrieval systems when no relevance labels are available. In this paper, we recognize the difficulty of zero-shot learning and encoding relevance. Instead, we propose to pivot through Hypothetical Document Embeddings (HyDE). Given a query, HyDE first zero-shot prompts an instruction-following language model (e.g., InstructGPT) to generate a hypothetical document. The document captures relevance patterns but is “fake” and may contain hallucinations. Then, an unsupervised contrastively learned encoder (e.g., Contriever) encodes the document into an embedding vector. This vector identifies a neighborhood in the corpus embedding space, from which similar real documents are retrieved based on vector similarity. This second step grounds the generated document to the actual corpus, with the encoder’s dense bottleneck filtering out the hallucinations. Our experiments show that HyDE significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art unsupervised dense retriever Contriever and shows strong performance comparable to fine-tuned retrievers across various tasks (e.g. web search, QA, fact verification) and in non-English languages (e.g., sw, ko, ja, bn).

TLDR

Towards Reasoning in Large Language Models: A Survey

  • Huang et al.

  • ACL

  • December 20, 2022

Reasoning is a fundamental aspect of human intelligence that plays a crucial role in activities such as problem solving, decision making, and critical thinking. In recent years, large language models (LLMs) have made significant progress in natural language processing, and there is observation that these models may exhibit reasoning abilities when they are sufficiently large. However, it is not yet clear to what extent LLMs are capable of reasoning. This paper provides a comprehensive overview of the current state of knowledge on reasoning in LLMs, including techniques for improving and eliciting reasoning in these models, methods and benchmarks for evaluating reasoning abilities, findings and implications of previous research in this field, and suggestions on future directions. Our aim is to provide a detailed and up-to-date review of this topic and stimulate meaningful discussion and future work.

TLDR

Instruction Induction: From Few Examples to Natural Language Task Descriptions

  • Honovich et al.

  • ACL

  • May 22, 2022

Large language models are able to perform a task by conditioning on a few input-output demonstrations - a paradigm known as in-context learning. We show that language models can explicitly infer an underlying task from a few demonstrations by prompting them to generate a natural language instruction that fits the examples. To explore this ability, we introduce the instruction induction challenge, compile a dataset consisting of 24 tasks, and define a novel evaluation metric based on executing the generated instruction. We discover that, to a large extent, the ability to generate instructions does indeed emerge when using a model that is both large enough and aligned to follow instructions; InstructGPT achieves 65.7% of human performance in our execution-based metric, while the original GPT-3 model reaches only 9.8% of human performance. This surprising result suggests that instruction induction might be a viable learning paradigm in and of itself, where instead of fitting a set of latent continuous parameters to the data, one searches for the best description in the natural language hypothesis space.

TLDR

It is discovered that, to a large extent, the ability to generate instructions does indeed emerge when using a model that is both large enough and aligned to follow instructions; this surprising result suggests that instruction induction might be a viable learning paradigm in and of itself.

One Embedder, Any Task: Instruction-Finetuned Text Embeddings

  • Su et al.

  • ACL

  • December 19, 2022

We introduce INSTRUCTOR, a new method for computing text embeddings given task instructions: every text input is embedded together with instructions explaining the use case (e.g., task and domain descriptions). Unlike encoders from prior work that are more specialized, INSTRUCTOR is a single embedder that can generate text embeddings tailored to different downstream tasks and domains, without any further training. We first annotate instructions for 330 diverse tasks and train INSTRUCTOR on this multitask mixture with a contrastive loss. We evaluate INSTRUCTOR on 70 embedding evaluation tasks (66 of which are unseen during training), ranging from classification and information retrieval to semantic textual similarity and text generation evaluation. INSTRUCTOR, while having an order of magnitude fewer parameters than the previous best model, achieves state-of-the-art performance, with an average improvement of 3.4% compared to the previous best results on the 70 diverse datasets. Our analysis suggests that INSTRUCTOR is robust to changes in instructions, and that instruction finetuning mitigates the challenge of training a single model on diverse datasets. Our model, code, and data are available at https://instructor-embedding.github.io.

TLDR

When Not to Trust Language Models: Investigating Effectiveness of Parametric and Non-Parametric Memories

  • Mallen et al.

  • ACL

  • December 20, 2022

Despite their impressive performance on diverse tasks, large language models (LMs) still struggle with tasks requiring rich world knowledge, implying the difficulty of encoding a wealth of world knowledge in their parameters. This paper aims to understand LMs’ strengths and limitations in memorizing factual knowledge, by conducting large-scale knowledge probing experiments on two open-domain entity-centric QA datasets: PopQA, our new dataset with 14k questions about long-tail entities, and EntityQuestions, a widely used open-domain QA dataset. We find that LMs struggle with less popular factual knowledge, and that retrieval augmentation helps significantly in these cases. Scaling, on the other hand, mainly improves memorization of popular knowledge, and fails to appreciably improve memorization of factual knowledge in the tail. Based on those findings, we devise a new method for retrieval-augmentation that improves performance and reduces inference costs by only retrieving non-parametric memories when necessary.

TLDR

Large Language Models Are Reasoning Teachers

  • Ho et al.

  • ACL

  • December 20, 2022

Recent works have shown that chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting can elicit language models to solve complex reasoning tasks, step-by-step. However, prompt-based CoT methods are dependent on very large models such as GPT-3 175B which are prohibitive to deploy at scale. In this paper, we use these large models as reasoning teachers to enable complex reasoning in smaller models and reduce model size requirements by several orders of magnitude. We propose Fine-tune-CoT, a method that generates reasoning samples from very large teacher models to fine-tune smaller models. We evaluate our method on a wide range of public models and complex tasks. We find that Fine-tune-CoT enables substantial reasoning capability in small models, far outperforming prompt-based baselines and even the teacher model in many tasks. Additionally, we extend our method by leveraging the teacher model’s ability to generate multiple distinct rationales for each original sample. Enriching the fine-tuning data with such diverse reasoning results in a substantial performance boost across datasets, even for very small models. We conduct ablations and sample studies to understand the emergence of reasoning capabilities of student models. Our code implementation and data are available at https://github.com/itsnamgyu/reasoning-teacher.

TLDR

EMNLP

Rethinking the Role of Demonstrations: What Makes In-Context Learning Work?

  • Min et al.

  • EMNLP

  • February 25, 2022

Large language models (LMs) are able to in-context learn—perform a new task via inference alone by conditioning on a few input-label pairs (demonstrations) and making predictions for new inputs. However, there has been little understanding of how the model learns and which aspects of the demonstrations contribute to end task performance. In this paper, we show that ground truth demonstrations are in fact not required—randomly replacing labels in the demonstrations barely hurts performance on a range of classification and multi-choce tasks, consistently over 12 different models including GPT-3. Instead, we find that other aspects of the demonstrations are the key drivers of endtask performance, including the fact that they provide a few examples of (1) the label space, (2) the distribution of the input text, and (3) the overall format of the sequence. Together, our analysis provides a new way of understanding how and why in-context learning works, while opening up new questions about how much can be learned from large language models through inference alone.

TLDR

This paper shows that ground truth demonstrations are in fact not required and that other aspects of the demonstrations are the key drivers of end task performance, including the fact that they provide a few examples of the label space, the distribution of the input text, and the overall format of the sequence.

SCROLLS: Standardized CompaRison Over Long Language Sequences

  • Shaham et al.

  • EMNLP

  • January 10, 2022

NLP benchmarks have largely focused on short texts, such as sentences and paragraphs, even though long texts comprise a considerable amount of natural language in the wild. We introduce SCROLLS, a suite of tasks that require reasoning over long texts. We examine existing long-text datasets, and handpick ones where the text is naturally long, while prioritizing tasks that involve synthesizing information across the input. SCROLLS contains summarization, question answering, and natural language inference tasks, covering multiple domains, including literature, science, business, and entertainment. Initial baselines, including Longformer Encoder-Decoder, indicate that there is ample room for improvement on SCROLLS. We make all datasets available in a unified text-to-text format and host a live leaderboard to facilitate research on model architecture and pretraining methods.

TLDR

S CROLLS is introduced, a suite of tasks that require reasoning over long texts, covering multiple domains, including literature, science, busi-ness, and entertainment, and is made available in a unified text-to-text format to facilitate research on model architecture and pretraining methods.

UnifiedSKG: Unifying and Multi-Tasking Structured Knowledge Grounding with Text-to-Text Language Models

  • Xie et al.

  • EMNLP

  • January 16, 2022

Structured knowledge grounding (SKG) leverages structured knowledge to complete user requests, such as semantic parsing over databases and question answering over knowledge bases. Since the inputs and outputs of SKG tasks are heterogeneous, they have been studied separately by different communities, which limits systematic and compatible research on SKG. In this paper, we overcome this limitation by proposing the UnifiedSKG framework, which unifies 21 SKG tasks into a text-to-text format, aiming to promote systematic SKG research, instead of being exclusive to a single task, domain, or dataset. We use UnifiedSKG to benchmark T5 with different sizes and show that T5, with simple modifications when necessary, achieves state-of-the-art performance on almost all of the 21 tasks. We further demonstrate that multi-task prefix-tuning improves the performance on most tasks, largely improving the overall performance. UnifiedSKG also facilitates the investigation of zero-shot and few-shot learning, and we show that T0, GPT-3, and Codex struggle in zero-shot and few-shot learning for SKG. We also use UnifiedSKG to conduct a series of controlled experiments on structured knowledge encoding variants across SKG tasks. UnifiedSKG is easily extensible to more tasks, and it is open-sourced at https://github.com/hkunlp/unifiedskg.

TLDR

The U NIFIED SKG framework is proposed, which unifies 21 SKG tasks into a text-to-text format, aiming to promote systematic SKG research, instead of being exclu-sive to a single task, domain, or dataset.

Red Teaming Language Models with Language Models

  • Perez et al.

  • EMNLP

  • February 7, 2022

Language Models (LMs) often cannot be deployed because of their potential to harm users in hard-to-predict ways. Prior work identifies harmful behaviors before deployment by using human annotators to hand-write test cases. However, human annotation is expensive, limiting the number and diversity of test cases. In this work, we automatically find cases where a target LM behaves in a harmful way, by generating test cases (“red teaming”) using another LM. We evaluate the target LM’s replies to generated test questions using a classifier trained to detect offensive content, uncovering tens of thousands of offensive replies in a 280B parameter LM chatbot. We explore several methods, from zero-shot generation to reinforcement learning, for generating test cases with varying levels of diversity and difficulty. Furthermore, we use prompt engineering to control LM-generated test cases to uncover a variety of other harms, automatically finding groups of people that the chatbot discusses in offensive ways, personal and hospital phone numbers generated as the chatbot’s own contact info, leakage of private training data in generated text, and harms that occur over the course of a conversation. Overall, LM-based red teaming is one promising tool (among many needed) for finding and fixing diverse, undesirable LM behaviors before impacting users.

TLDR

This work automatically finds cases where a target LM behaves in a harmful way, by generating test cases (“red teaming”) using another LM, and evaluates the target LM’s replies to generated test questions using a classifier trained to detect offensive content.

Super-NaturalInstructions: Generalization via Declarative Instructions on 1600+ NLP Tasks

  • Wang et al.

  • EMNLP

  • April 16, 2022

How well can NLP models generalize to a variety of unseen tasks when provided with task instructions? To address this question, we first introduce Super-NaturalInstructions, a benchmark of 1,616 diverse NLP tasks and their expert-written instructions. Our collection covers 76 distinct task types, including but not limited to classification, extraction, infilling, sequence tagging, text rewriting, and text composition. This large and diverse collection of tasks enables rigorous benchmarking of cross-task generalization under instructions—training models to follow instructions on a subset of tasks and evaluating them on the remaining unseen ones.Furthermore, we build Tk-Instruct, a transformer model trained to follow a variety of in-context instructions (plain language task definitions or k-shot examples). Our experiments show that Tk-Instruct outperforms existing instruction-following models such as InstructGPT by over 9% on our benchmark despite being an order of magnitude smaller. We further analyze generalization as a function of various scaling parameters, such as the number of observed tasks, the number of instances per task, and model sizes. We hope our dataset and model facilitate future progress towards more general-purpose NLP models.

TLDR

These data support the concept that proper ED evaluation can identify a large body of patients with trivial ingestions who may not require hospital observation and help generalize NLP models to a variety of unseen tasks.

RLPrompt: Optimizing Discrete Text Prompts with Reinforcement Learning

  • Deng et al.

  • EMNLP

  • May 25, 2022

Prompting has shown impressive success in enabling large pre-trained language models (LMs) to perform diverse NLP tasks, especially with only few downstream data. Automatically finding the optimal prompt for each task, however, is challenging. Most existing work resorts to tuning *soft* prompts (e.g., embeddings) which fall short of interpretability, reusability across LMs, and applicability when gradients are not accessible. *Discrete* prompts, on the other hand, are difficult to optimize, and are often created by “enumeration (e.g., paraphrasing)-then-selection” heuristics that do not explore the prompt space systematically. This paper proposes RLPrompt, an efficient discrete prompt optimization approach with reinforcement learning (RL). RLPrompt formulates a parameter-efficient policy network that generates the optimized discrete prompt after training with reward. To harness the complex and stochastic reward signals from the large LM environment, we incorporate effective reward stabilization that substantially enhances training efficiency. RLPrompt is flexibly applicable to different types of LMs, such as masked (e.g., BERT) and left-to-right models (e.g., GPTs), for both classification and generation tasks. Experiments on few-shot classification and unsupervised text style transfer show superior performance over a wide range of existing fine-tuning or prompting methods. Interestingly, the resulting optimized prompts are often ungrammatical gibberish text; and surprisingly, those gibberish prompts are transferrable between different LMs to retain significant performance, indicating that LM prompting may not follow human language patterns.

TLDR

RLP ROMPT formulates a parameter-efficient policy network that generates the desired discrete prompt after training with reward to overcome the complexity and stochasticity of reward signals by the large LM environment, and incorporates effective reward stabilization that substantially enhances the training efflciency.

Prompting ELECTRA: Few-Shot Learning with Discriminative Pre-Trained Models

  • Xia et al.

  • EMNLP

  • May 30, 2022

Pre-trained masked language models successfully perform few-shot learning by formulating downstream tasks as text infilling. How- ever, as a strong alternative in full-shot settings, discriminative pre-trained models like ELECTRA do not fit into the paradigm. In this work, we adapt prompt-based few-shot learning to ELECTRA and show that it outperforms masked language models in a wide range of tasks. ELECTRA is pre-trained to distinguish if a token is generated or original. We naturally extend that to prompt-based few-shot learning by training to score the originality of the target options without introducing new parameters. Our method can be easily adapted to tasks involving multi-token predictions without extra computation overhead. Analysis shows that ELECTRA learns distributions that align better with downstream tasks.

TLDR

This work adapts prompt-based few-shot learning to ELECTRA and shows that it outperforms masked language models in a wide range of tasks.

Training Language Models with Memory Augmentation

  • Zhong et al.

  • EMNLP

  • May 25, 2022

Recent work has improved language models (LMs) remarkably by equipping them with a non-parametric memory component. However, most existing approaches only introduce mem-ories at testing time or represent them using a separately trained encoder, resulting in suboptimal training of the language model. In this work, we present TRIME, a novel yet simple training approach designed for training LMs with memory augmentation. Our approach uses a training objective that directly takes in-batch examples as accessible memory. We also present new methods for memory construction and data batching, which are used for adapting to different sets of memories—local, long-term, and external memory—at testing time. We evaluate TRIME on multiple language modeling and machine translation benchmarks and show that it is able to achieve significant improvements across all the settings. Concretely, TRIME reduces the perplexity from 18.70 to 15.37 on WIKITEXT-103, by effectively leveraging a large memory set from the training corpus. Compared to standard LM training, TRIME adds negligible computational overhead and is compatible with different neural architectures, making it a versatile solution for training memory-augmented LMs.

TLDR

T RIME is presented, a novel yet simple training approach designed for training LMs with memory augmentation that adds negligible computational overhead and is compatible with different neural architectures, making it a versatile solution for training memory-augmented LMs.

Large language models are few-shot clinical information extractors

  • Agrawal et al.

  • EMNLP

  • May 25, 2022

A long-running goal of the clinical NLP community is the extraction of important variables trapped in clinical notes. However, roadblocks have included dataset shift from the general domain and a lack of public clinical corpora and annotations. In this work, we show that large language models, such as InstructGPT (Ouyang et al., 2022), perform well at zero- and few-shot information extraction from clinical text despite not being trained specifically for the clinical domain. Whereas text classification and generation performance have already been studied extensively in such models, here we additionally demonstrate how to leverage them to tackle a diverse set of NLP tasks which require more structured outputs, including span identification, token-level sequence classification, and relation extraction. Further, due to the dearth of available data to evaluate these systems, we introduce new datasets for benchmarking few-shot clinical information extraction based on a manual re-annotation of the CASI dataset (Moon et al., 2014) for new tasks. On the clinical extraction tasks we studied, the GPT-3 systems significantly outperform existing zero- and few-shot baselines.

TLDR

It is shown that large language models, such as GPT-3, perform well at zero-shot information extraction from clinical text despite not being trained specifically for the clinical domain, and that good resolvers share common components (e.g., “safety checks” that ensure the language model outputs faithfully match the input data).

ACCoRD: A Multi-Document Approach to Generating Diverse Descriptions of Scientific Concepts

  • Murthy et al.

  • EMNLP

  • May 14, 2022

Systems that can automatically define unfamiliar terms hold the promise of improving the accessibility of scientific texts, especially for readers who may lack prerequisite background knowledge. However, current systems assume a single"best"description per concept, which fails to account for the many potentially useful ways a concept can be described. We present ACCoRD, an end-to-end system tackling the novel task of generating sets of descriptions of scientific concepts. Our system takes advantage of the myriad ways a concept is mentioned across the scientific literature to produce distinct, diverse descriptions of target scientific concepts in terms of different reference concepts. To support research on the task, we release an expert-annotated resource, the ACCoRD corpus, which includes 1,275 labeled contexts and 1,787 hand-authored concept descriptions. We conduct a user study demonstrating that (1) users prefer descriptions produced by our end-to-end system, and (2) users prefer multiple descriptions to a single"best"description.

TLDR

ACCoRD, an end-to-end system tack-ling the novel task of generating sets of descriptions of scientific concepts, is presented and a user study is conducted demonstrating that users prefer descriptions produced by the system, and users prefer multiple descriptions to a single “best” description.

ICML

DS-1000: A Natural and Reliable Benchmark for Data Science Code Generation

  • Lai et al.

  • ICML

  • November 18, 2022

We introduce DS-1000, a code generation benchmark with a thousand data science problems spanning seven Python libraries, such as NumPy and Pandas. Compared to prior works, DS-1000 incorporates three core features. First, our problems reflect diverse, realistic, and practical use cases since we collected them from StackOverflow. Second, our automatic evaluation is highly specific (reliable) -- across all Codex-002-predicted solutions that our evaluation accept, only 1.8% of them are incorrect; we achieve this with multi-criteria metrics, checking both functional correctness by running test cases and surface-form constraints by restricting API usages or keywords. Finally, we proactively defend against memorization by slightly modifying our problems to be different from the original StackOverflow source; consequently, models cannot answer them correctly by memorizing the solutions from pre-training. The current best public system (Codex-002) achieves 43.3% accuracy, leaving ample room for improvement. We release our benchmark at https://ds1000-code-gen.github.io.

TLDR

Synthetic Prompting: Generating Chain-of-Thought Demonstrations for Large Language Models

  • Shao et al.

  • ICML

  • February 1, 2023

Large language models can perform various reasoning tasks by using chain-of-thought prompting, which guides them to find answers through step-by-step demonstrations. However, the quality of the prompts depends on the demonstrations given to the models, and creating many of them by hand is costly. We introduce Synthetic prompting, a method that leverages a few handcrafted examples to prompt the model to generate more examples by itself, and selects effective demonstrations to elicit better reasoning. Our method alternates between a backward and forward process to generate new examples. The backward process generates a question that match a sampled reasoning chain, so that the question is solvable and clear. The forward process produces a more detailed reasoning chain for the question, improving the quality of the example. We evaluate our method on numerical, symbolic, and algorithmic reasoning tasks, and show that it outperforms existing prompting techniques.

TLDR

PaLM-E: An Embodied Multimodal Language Model

  • Driess et al.

  • ICML

  • March 6, 2023

Large language models excel at a wide range of complex tasks. However, enabling general inference in the real world, e.g., for robotics problems, raises the challenge of grounding. We propose embodied language models to directly incorporate real-world continuous sensor modalities into language models and thereby establish the link between words and percepts. Input to our embodied language model are multi-modal sentences that interleave visual, continuous state estimation, and textual input encodings. We train these encodings end-to-end, in conjunction with a pre-trained large language model, for multiple embodied tasks including sequential robotic manipulation planning, visual question answering, and captioning. Our evaluations show that PaLM-E, a single large embodied multimodal model, can address a variety of embodied reasoning tasks, from a variety of observation modalities, on multiple embodiments, and further, exhibits positive transfer: the model benefits from diverse joint training across internet-scale language, vision, and visual-language domains. Our largest model, PaLM-E-562B with 562B parameters, in addition to being trained on robotics tasks, is a visual-language generalist with state-of-the-art performance on OK-VQA, and retains generalist language capabilities with increasing scale.

TLDR

BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models

  • Li et al.

  • ICML

  • January 30, 2023

The cost of vision-and-language pre-training has become increasingly prohibitive due to end-to-end training of large-scale models. This paper proposes BLIP-2, a generic and efficient pre-training strategy that bootstraps vision-language pre-training from off-the-shelf frozen pre-trained image encoders and frozen large language models. BLIP-2 bridges the modality gap with a lightweight Querying Transformer, which is pre-trained in two stages. The first stage bootstraps vision-language representation learning from a frozen image encoder. The second stage bootstraps vision-to-language generative learning from a frozen language model. BLIP-2 achieves state-of-the-art performance on various vision-language tasks, despite having significantly fewer trainable parameters than existing methods. For example, our model outperforms Flamingo80B by 8.7% on zero-shot VQAv2 with 54x fewer trainable parameters. We also demonstrate the model's emerging capabilities of zero-shot image-to-text generation that can follow natural language instructions.

TLDR

PAL: Program-aided Language Models

  • Gao et al.

  • ICML

  • November 18, 2022

Large language models (LLMs) have recently demonstrated an impressive ability to perform arithmetic and symbolic reasoning tasks, when provided with a few examples at test time ("few-shot prompting"). Much of this success can be attributed to prompting methods such as"chain-of-thought'', which employ LLMs for both understanding the problem description by decomposing it into steps, as well as solving each step of the problem. While LLMs seem to be adept at this sort of step-by-step decomposition, LLMs often make logical and arithmetic mistakes in the solution part, even when the problem is decomposed correctly. In this paper, we present Program-Aided Language models (PAL): a novel approach that uses the LLM to read natural language problems and generate programs as the intermediate reasoning steps, but offloads the solution step to a runtime such as a Python interpreter. With PAL, decomposing the natural language problem into runnable steps remains the only learning task for the LLM, while solving is delegated to the interpreter. We demonstrate this synergy between a neural LLM and a symbolic interpreter across 13 mathematical, symbolic, and algorithmic reasoning tasks from BIG-Bench Hard and other benchmarks. In all these natural language reasoning tasks, generating code using an LLM and reasoning using a Python interpreter leads to more accurate results than much larger models. For example, PAL using Codex achieves state-of-the-art few-shot accuracy on the GSM8K benchmark of math word problems, surpassing PaLM-540B which uses chain-of-thought by absolute 15% top-1. Our code and data are publicly available at http://reasonwithpal.com/ .

TLDR

The Flan Collection: Designing Data and Methods for Effective Instruction Tuning

  • Longpre et al.

  • ICML

  • January 31, 2023

We study the design decisions of publicly available instruction tuning methods, and break down the development of Flan 2022 (Chung et al., 2022). Through careful ablation studies on the Flan Collection of tasks and methods, we tease apart the effect of design decisions which enable Flan-T5 to outperform prior work by 3-17%+ across evaluation settings. We find task balancing and enrichment techniques are overlooked but critical to effective instruction tuning, and in particular, training with mixed prompt settings (zero-shot, few-shot, and chain-of-thought) actually yields stronger (2%+) performance in all settings. In further experiments, we show Flan-T5 requires less finetuning to converge higher and faster than T5 on single downstream tasks, motivating instruction-tuned models as more computationally-efficient starting checkpoints for new tasks. Finally, to accelerate research on instruction tuning, we make the Flan 2022 collection of datasets, templates, and methods publicly available at https://github.com/google-research/FLAN/tree/main/flan/v2.

TLDR

UPop: Unified and Progressive Pruning for Compressing Vision-Language Transformers

  • Shi et al.

  • ICML

  • January 31, 2023

Real-world data contains a vast amount of multimodal information, among which vision and language are the two most representative modalities. Moreover, increasingly heavier models, \textit{e}.\textit{g}., Transformers, have attracted the attention of researchers to model compression. However, how to compress multimodal models, especially vison-language Transformers, is still under-explored. This paper proposes the \textbf{U}nified and \textbf{P}r\textbf{o}gressive \textbf{P}runing (\textbf{\emph{UPop}}) as a universal vison-language Transformer compression framework, which incorporates 1) unifiedly searching multimodal subnets in a continuous optimization space from the original model, which enables automatic assignment of pruning ratios among compressible modalities and structures; 2) progressively searching and retraining the subnet, which maintains convergence between the search and retrain to attain higher compression ratios. Experiments on various tasks, datasets, and model architectures demonstrate the effectiveness and versatility of the proposed UPop framework. The code is available at https://github.com/sdc17/UPop.

TLDR

Pythia: A Suite for Analyzing Large Language Models Across Training and Scaling

  • Biderman et al.

  • ICML

  • April 3, 2023

How do large language models (LLMs) develop and evolve over the course of training? How do these patterns change as models scale? To answer these questions, we introduce \textit{Pythia}, a suite of 16 LLMs all trained on public data seen in the exact same order and ranging in size from 70M to 12B parameters. We provide public access to 154 checkpoints for each one of the 16 models, alongside tools to download and reconstruct their exact training dataloaders for further study. We intend \textit{Pythia} to facilitate research in many areas, and we present several case studies including novel results in memorization, term frequency effects on few-shot performance, and reducing gender bias. We demonstrate that this highly controlled setup can be used to yield novel insights toward LLMs and their training dynamics. Trained models, analysis code, training code, and training data can be found at \url{https://github.com/EleutherAI/pythia}.

TLDR

A Watermark for Large Language Models

  • Kirchenbauer et al.

  • ICML

  • January 24, 2023

Potential harms of large language models can be mitigated by watermarking model output, i.e., embedding signals into generated text that are invisible to humans but algorithmically detectable from a short span of tokens. We propose a watermarking framework for proprietary language models. The watermark can be embedded with negligible impact on text quality, and can be detected using an efficient open-source algorithm without access to the language model API or parameters. The watermark works by selecting a randomized set of"green"tokens before a word is generated, and then softly promoting use of green tokens during sampling. We propose a statistical test for detecting the watermark with interpretable p-values, and derive an information-theoretic framework for analyzing the sensitivity of the watermark. We test the watermark using a multi-billion parameter model from the Open Pretrained Transformer (OPT) family, and discuss robustness and security.

TLDR

Robust Speech Recognition via Large-Scale Weak Supervision

  • Radford et al.

  • ICML

  • December 6, 2022

We study the capabilities of speech processing systems trained simply to predict large amounts of transcripts of audio on the internet. When scaled to 680,000 hours of multilingual and multitask supervision, the resulting models generalize well to standard benchmarks and are often competitive with prior fully supervised results but in a zero-shot transfer setting without the need for any fine-tuning. When compared to humans, the models approach their accuracy and robustness. We are releasing models and inference code to serve as a foundation for further work on robust speech processing.

TLDR

The capabilities of speech processing systems trained simply to predict large amounts of transcripts of audio on the internet are studied, with results that are often competitive with prior fully supervised results but in a zero-shot transfer setting without the need for any fine-tuning.

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